Should I install Gentoo now or wait for 2007.0?

[klees]

I'm debating with myself whether to install Gentoo (2006.1) now or wait for the upcoming release. I'm new to Gentoo but not linux. I've tried every major distro out there and was looking for a change. What worries me are the compile times but that's a different story. Back to my topic... will I need to reinstall Gentoo when 2007.0 comes out if I were to install 2006.1 now? If so, then I guess I should wait.

Also, I have an Athlon XP 2800+, 1gb RAM (dual channel) and two SATA drives. Based on these specs, how long will it take me to have a full operating system with X and KDE? Are there compile charts out there that would give me an idea? Should I emerge X and KDE from the LiveCD install or should I emerge after I've done the minimal install (if I were to install Gentoo now). Thanks in advanced.

[Paapaa]

No, Gentoo doesn't have different versions: Gentoo is always up to date (if you remember to update it)! There is no logical reason to wait for 2007.0 as it is only the installation medium. If you install now you will end up with identical installation. You just have to switch to 2007.0 profile when it becomes available.

[gr8fuljames]

[klees]

Awesome! That means I'll start the install this weekend.

Any ideas how long will it take me to compile Xorg 7.1 and KDE 3.5.6?

[luqas]

At least a couple of hours, but it depends on your system spec. Best thing to do is start it at night before you go to bed and it will be ready for you in the morning. Or if you are sick like me, watch it compile for the first time

[Voltago]

[madisonicus]

[enlightend]

As I see it a new Gentoo version is simply a more recent boot kernel, portage snapshot and more recent stage3 layout then the previous version.

I installed a 2006.1 stage3 by booting from a 2004.1 live CD earlyer (I was to lazy to switch to the 2006.1 CD after I had already booted the 2004.1 :p and I like a bit of adventure)

When time came to chroot, (this is after a portage snapshot and stage3 have been extracted) it told me the kernel was to old to chroot into the new 2006.1 based installation from a 2004.1 2.6.x SMP kernel which is perfectly natural and expected.

So next I did the following:

1: Started SSHD on the new box.
2: Went on one of my other gentoo boxes, compiled a 2.6.19-r6 SMP P3 PIIX4 kernel on it.
3: Sftp'd it to the box I was installing.
4: Sftp'd the grub executable from the working server to the new box.
5: Installed grub on the new boxes disk.
6: Did passwd on the new box.
7: Copied /etc/shadow to /mnt/gentoo/etc/shadow
6: Rebooted the new box.
7: Logged into the Stage3 layout with a 100% up to date SMP kernel (which could be considered a partial 2007.0 install I guess considering that 2 out of the 3 needed components are up to date).
8: Hit emerge --sync
9: emerged grub, syslog-ng, vixie-cron, ccache and distcc.
10: Setup distcc to use my other systems
11: emerge -eDN system && emerge -eDN world

Emerge is in the world stage right now at package 93 of 108 after just 6 hours.
I'm expecting it to finish in about an hour or 3 (package 94 is GCC 4.1.1 and after that comes glibc 2.5 ...)

So it doesn't really matter what you use as an installation medium. You'll emerge -uDN everything at the end of your installation anyways bringing everything up to and beyond a 2007.0 level.

To show this even further.

I manage some webservers hosted at serverbeach.
One of them got handed to me with RH9 installed on it that wasn't updated for 3 or 4 years.

I used serverbeach's rapid rescue routine which boots the servers of a very basic linux recovery image.

I proceeded deleting everything on that servers disks except the data. Downloaded a stage 3 and portage snapshot, chrooted into the environement, built the system, rebooted and had the server up and running with a working gentoo environment in no time.

You can probably do an online gentoo install from a floppydisk too. All you need is a working boot environement.